That Cute Whale You Clicked On? It’s Doomed

I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw it: a white fuzz ball of a baby seal, snuggling in a snowdrift. I stared dopily into its clear black eyes, squealed at the screen and tapped the cartoon heart beneath the photo. You better believe I liked it.

Then I read the caption.

“A newborn harp seal hides behind a piece of sea ice and seeks shelter during a blizzard,” it said. Aww. It went on: “With human-induced climate and the loss of sea ice, harp seals are losing their birthing grounds.” Oh. “In 2007,” it added, “more than 70 percent of the pups died due to poor ice conditions. In 2010, almost none survived. As I type this, baby harp seals are struggling to survive yet another terrible ice year near the Magdalen Islands.” Oh, God.

I came to Instagram to get a quick baby animal fix and left with a horrifying message about how climate change could wipe this pup from the face of the planet, and all of its little friends, too.

Paul Nicklen, the wildlife photographer who took the image, knows what he’s doing. “I hang a cute animal picture out there like bait and reel them in,” he told me.

I’m hooked. Intellectually, I understand that climate change is one of the most important issues facing our planet. But practically, I ignore it. The problem feels too big, and the science too boring. I’ve never found a convenient time to watch “An Inconvenient Truth.” I haven’t paged through a copy of National Geographic in my adult life. I’m part of the problem.

But now, a crew of wildlife photographers and conservationists has found a way to reach me through one of social media’s shallowest pleasures: ogling marine mammals on Instagram.

“Climate change is so huge, so uncomfortable, and so overwhelming, it’s hard to talk about it,” Mr. Nicklen said. “And often the best scientists are the worst communicators.”

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Who can resist a face like this on Instagram? A sea otter can help spread a powerful message.CreditPaul Nicklen

Mr. Nicklen, a marine biologist as well as a photographer, is not personally drawn to the cutesy stuff. But after posting a picture two years ago of a snow-dusted baby Emperor penguin that inspired an avalanche of “likes,” he’s come around to the advantages of the aesthetic. He regularly draws in his 2.6 million followers with heartwarming images, then pairs them with captions that recast them as cautionary tales. Every so often, he’ll post a direct glimpse of impending doom: a sea otter wheezing its last breaths on an Alaskan beach, or the body of a young polar bear that starved to death in an area of the Arctic that has lost its ice.

Following wildlife Instagram means experiencing emotional whiplash. The savviest photographers work to achieve a careful balance between the superficial and the political. Jasper Doest, a Dutch wildlife photographer and conservationist, recently took a series of haunting photographs of white storks that had made their homes on European landfills. “I could fill up my whole Instagram with very harsh images of storks laying there dead in the garbage and feeding on plastic, but people would eventually have enough of that,” Mr. Doest said. He takes care to insert idyllic images amid the uncomfortable ones. “The first thing you want is for the audience to fall in love with the subject,” he said. Only then do you show that subject living on human garbage.

Keeping the Instagram audience clicking into a wildlife photographer’s feed means serving up different kinds of images from those that appear in National Geographic.

One of Brian Skerry’s most celebrated photographs shows a dead thresher shark caught in a fishing net off the Mexican coast; National Geographic has named it one of the magazine’s 50 greatest photographs of all time. But when Mr. Skerry, a longtime National Geographic photojournalist, shared it with his 465,000 Instagram followers, it was met with a muted response. More popular than the shark are the images Mr. Skerry took of a spinner dolphin leaping beneath a rainbow, a baby beluga whale seemingly smiling coyly for the camera, and a seal posing coolly underwater with one flipper folded over the other. The seal looks as if it were “about to drop his mixtape,” as one commenter put it.

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A harbor seal in a kelp bed in Sointula, British Columbia.CreditPaul Nicklen

These casual internet surfers might be tempted to scroll past conservation public service announcements (preachy) or scientific tracts (boring). But Instagram’s freewheeling platform has opened a trap door into environmental awareness. When Mr. Skerry posted a close-up portrait of a baby seal, he tagged it with the terms #climatechange and #nature, but also #seals, #babyanimals and #love. The Instagram users lured in by a magnetic animal photo may find themselves unexpectedly open to the climate-change message. “It can make them feel like they’re making these discoveries on their own,” Mr. Nicklen said.

And while Instagram lacks the fact-checking safeguards of more traditional scientific sources, it engenders a sincere, authentic experience. “Because of the intimate nature of these posts, viewers come to trust the photographers,” said Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer who has dedicated his career (and his Instagram) to photographing rare animals. “They feel that they know them.”

The comments in wildlife photographers’ feeds have spontaneously turned into de facto public forums on climate-change science. Under a recent photograph of a polar bear that died of starvation, posted by Mr. Nicklen, an argument unfurled among sentimental animal lovers (“Can the governments do something? Drop fish, meat, anything to give these animals strength?”); radical vegans (it’s “meat and dairy eaters … Who claim to be animal lovers ... Who are contributing to this”); and climate change deniers (“You people do realize that we are coming out of an ice age.”) Last year, Mr. Nicklen and the photographer Cristina Mittermeier began SeaLegacy, a nonprofit that “bridges the gap between information and emotion” by pairing photographers with activist organizations.

Instagram’s conservationists are hoping their images will inspire fans to do more than just look. That will test the limits of human nature, not to mention the constraints of the platform. Instagram is built for passing out eye candy. The captions are afterthoughts. When I scroll through my feed, it feels so good to tap and share an image that I don’t even think to feel bad for skipping over some critical context. Animals may be dying in the Arctic, but on Instagram, I can always find a newborn seal pup to share. The pictures are so freaking cute — who among us is strong enough to stop staring at the phone and start taking action?

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clicking on Cuteness? That Animal’s Doomed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe